The Wren, The Wren

Carmel had been alone all her life. She had been alone since she was twelve years old. The baby knew all this. They looked at each other, and all of time was there. The baby knew how vast her mother's loneliness had been. A generational saga and contemporary meditation on daughterhood and motherhood, from the Booker Prize-winning Irish author'One of our greatest living novelists' THE TIMES'The unofficial rock star of literary fiction' IRISH TIMES'One of the most significant writers of her generation' SUNDAY TIMESNell - funny, brave and so much loved - is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets out into the world, she finds her family history hard to escape. For her mother, Carmel, Nell's leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. And across the generations falls the long shadow of Carmel's famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions. This is a meditation on love: spiritual, romantic, darkly sexual or genetic. A generational saga that traces the inheritance not just of trauma but also of wonder, it is a testament to the glorious resilience of women in the face of promises false and true. Above all, it is an exploration of the love between mother and daughter - sometimes fierce, often painful, but always transcendent.

One of our greatest living novelists, Anne Enright's style is as sharp and brilliant as Joan Didion's; the scope of her understanding is as wide as Alice Munro's; her vision of Ireland is as brave and original as Edna O'Brien's, Somehow both classic and thoroughly contemporary. Very few writers could capably achieve such a thing and I remain, as ever, in awe of Anne's talents, This is Anne Enright at her best - a glorious multi-generational novel of mothers and daughters, of tangled relationships, secrets, bodies, sex. Sharp, sudden, mischievous, sublime - this is a dazzling novel, The unofficial rock star of literary fiction

Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has written two collections of stories, published together as Yesterday's Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and seven novels, including The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and The Green Road, which was the Bord Gáis Energy Novel of the Year and won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. In 2015 she was appointed as the first Laureate for Irish Fiction, and in 2018 she received the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature. She is also the recipient of the 2022 Irish Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award.

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